It's my opinion, but a traditional 'stackable' switch has a very high speed, high bandwidth, redundant bus for the interconnect. I.e. 3750x. Which allows multiple switches to be stacked. On the 2960TS, you are effectively limited to two. More than that and you lose redundancy and the link becomes ineffective. Since the 2x 10GbE interconnects would be split between three switches. A true stack doesn't suffer that issue. There's no hoping between switches to get to another stack member.

For a small environment that would be fine to just have the two switches.

I think you're wrong. The OP is referring to 2960-S with flexstack modules, not using 2x 10GbE uplink ports. I do think the limit on flexstack is 20Gbps so in a way it adds up to a similar thing.

A.W I have a pair of stacked 2960-S running iSCSI. Just used 802.3AD active/active bonds for the SANs and host based active/passive bonds for hosts (with each port going in to a different switch). The main limitation on these is the number of port groups (available for active/active bonds) which I seem to remember was around 6?

Found this recently which may be useful for someone else using these for iSCSI:

The 2960 stacking uses the 2x 10GbE ports. Not what I consider 'stackable' switch. I.e. the 3750 line which allows a number of switches to be stacked together over a much higher speed bus. So effectively the 2960 is limited to 2x switches.

It's my opinion, but a traditional 'stackable' switch has a very high speed, high bandwidth, redundant bus for the interconnect. I.e. 3750x. Which allows multiple switches to be stacked. On the 2960TS, you are effectively limited to two. More than that and you lose redundancy and the link becomes ineffective. Since the 2x 10GbE interconnects would be split between three switches. A true stack doesn't suffer that issue. There's no hoping between switches to get to another stack member.

For a small environment that would be fine to just have the two switches.

I think you're wrong. The OP is referring to 2960-S with flexstack modules, not using 2x 10GbE uplink ports. I do think the limit on flexstack is 20Gbps so in a way it adds up to a similar thing.

A.W I have a pair of stacked 2960-S running iSCSI. Just used 802.3AD active/active bonds for the SANs and host based active/passive bonds for hosts (with each port going in to a different switch). The main limitation on these is the number of port groups (available for active/active bonds) which I seem to remember was around 6?

Found this recently which may be useful for someone else using these for iSCSI: